Amanda Cox: Developing Infographics At The New York Times

By Andrew Vande Moere (Associate Professor, K.U.Leuven University)
The New York Times graphics department produces some of the best visualizations in the world. We have seen its director, Steve Duenes, give a talk about some of their best works and provide some answers on their internal approach.

Who I had not seen talk before, however, is Amanda Cox, whose name is often featured on quite some innovative works, such as the voronoi treemap showing the Consumer Price Index, the interactive timeline revealing Michael Jackson’s career statistics, the streamgraphs that map how people spend their day, or the dense yet intuitive line graphs that unravel the potential socio-demographic drivers of the unemployment in the US.

In the small collection of (4 different) videos you can watch below, Amanda shares some of the lessons the group has learned along the way, particularly on how to integrate real interactivity with storytelling, and how to strike a balance between clarity and creating a sense of wonder.

For those more interested in the implementation side of online infographics development, two videos show Amanda discuss how the NYTimes uses the program R as an exploratory tool for professional data visualization.

Amanda Cox at New Media Days (Denmark).
“Yes, she is slightly nervous — yes, she loses her breath from the long sentences she uses — but the content in her speaking is second-to-none.” (Visual Journalism)